Dog Days Pt 2

The first time I tried to foster it didn’t go great; my husband almost lost his fingertips, the ghost of Charles Manson haunted the surrounding desert, and the shelter doors were shut in our faces. This all happened last week as pandemic panic was mounting, and while Chris and I had braced for bureaucratic chaos involving LA Animal Services, the ordeal still became a personal breaking point. My altruism was unmasked as selfishness, a great fear of becoming useless came to pass, and while weeping in a Chatsworth parking lot, I accepted that my toes had been curled over the edge of sanity for some time now -- I just hadn’t realized it until the moment we were forced to drive home without a dog.

The benefit of quarantine however, is there’s time for second chances. Earlier this week we returned the towels to the back seat of the car, and drove two and a half hours up the coast to Santa Maria, birthplace of tri-tip steak, annual producer of 20 million trays of strawberries, home to the real-life Zorro, Salomon Pico, who may still have gold stashed in the hills above the animal shelter. 

The whole region is home to all kinds of treasure. 

Eight miles northwest of Santa Maria lies the Guadalupe-Nipomo Dunes, first home to the Chumash tribe, who built boats out of redwood planks sealed with tar and lived off the sea. They were all but wiped out by influenza, smallpox, mass murder, and Christianization perpetuated by Spanish missionaries who arrived in 1769 and immediately set about collecting souls. The first recorded baptism was performed during the Franciscans’ journey up the coast by Rev. Juan Crespi and Rev. Francisco Gómez, who came across a baby and small girl from the Acjachemen tribe dying of burns. The men took the children from their mother and performed Catholic rites, renaming the girls Maria and Margarita in a canyon now inside a United States Marine Base. We don’t know the girls’ given names, but it’s presumed they died soon after their baptisms. As for the missionaries, they continued continued northward and by 1831, European disease had reduced the Chumash population from 22,000 to 2,788. 

Centuries later, the most expensive film to date was shot in those dunes—Cecil B. DeMille’s 1923 epic The Ten Commandments. To recreate ancient Egypt, DeMille employed hundreds of builders to construct a dozen plaster sphinxes, a great gate adorned with rearing stallions, and a 35-foot Pharaoh surveying his counterfeit kingdom. When filming was complete, DeMille used dynamite and bulldozers to bury the set to prevent rival directors from filming their own epics on the cheap. Despite a few attempts at excavation, to this day most of those plaster monuments remain in the sand, sunk beneath what locals call “the dune that never moves.” 

A few years after DeMille struck the set, the dunes offered up a different kind of gift, this time to a congregation of drifters, nudists, moonshiners, mystics, and Lemurians who created a remote community out in the sand. They built shacks out of “driftwood and old planking, with old automobile windshields used for glass,” reported The Dunites, a history of the commune by Norm Hammond. These “non-competitive types” were searching for artistic freedom, an escape from the paranoia of War Time America, and for some castoffs of the Great Depression and a society without Social Security, the dunes were just their last place to go. “You’ve got clams in the ocean, you got a place to live with no rent and no taxes and some protein and all the necessities of life,” explained Hammond. For a while the community thrived, publishing the magazine The Dune Forum and attracting visitors such as Ansel Adams, John Steinbeck, and Meher Baba, still in the midst of his forty-four year vow of silence. 

The story of the desert though, is that it’s impossible to build anything lasting on shifting sands. In the 1950s the Unocal Corporation (who makes an cameo in There Will be Blood if that gives you an idea of who we’re dealing with) discovered crude oil that could only be pumped from under the dunes with the addition of a mix of diesel and kerosene called diluent. By the late 1980s dead sea lions began to wash ashore, and in 1992, the feds raided Unocal’s offices and seized records proving that for decades the company knew they were leaking millions of gallons of diluent into the sand, committing the largest oil spill in California history in secret. No one went to jail, but the community has been assured that cleanup is underway. The remediation project manager is a Unocal employee named Gonzalo Garcia, who in interviews wears a company sweatshirt that reads, “Concluding our activities in a responsible way.” 

So, the story of how we got our dog. I took the long way getting there and I apologize. It’s just, we’re living through plague times, and I’ve been overwhelmed by the sense that we’re all bound to one another, inescapably so. We can't help but leave our marks on one another like desert tar, and it’s impossible for me, right now, to write about just one thing. I could keep going, you know, spinning narrative digressions up and down the California coast — Jeanie MacPherson, the antifundamentalist screenwriter of The Ten Commandments and her affair with DeMille; Gavin Arthur, Dunite and grandson of a president who moved to Ireland to fight for independence; how Chumash spiritual leaders still tell stories of women giving birth on the beach surrounded by dolphins for protection; and of course the ongoing crimes of Unocal, and how in their late 90s quest to build a pipeline from Turkmenistan to the Arabian Sea, they partnered with both Henry Kissinger and the Taliban, gifting the latter over a million dollars. But then there’s also the story of our dog, whose history is unknown. “We don’t know why his previous fosters returned him,” said the volunteer coordinator. Chris and I don’t know either. He’s a 7-year-old Catahoula Leopard Dog we’re calling Clarence because we figured history’s good Clarences (Clemons, Darrow, Odbody) outnumber the bad (Thomas).What can I say except he’s a dignified old man who spends his days snoozing and snuggling and peeing on every tree trunk on Hollywood Blvd. As Los Angeles native Ann Patchett writes in “This Dog’s Life,” a wonderfully effortless essay about doing the obvious thing you know will make life better, “It’s not that I was unhappy in what I now think of as ‘the dogless years,’ but I suspected things could be better. What I never could have imagined was how much better they would be.” The essay ends: “I thought a dog would be the key to perfect happiness. And I was right. We are perfectly happy.” Ann of course wasn’t writing that in the eye of a storm, and these days I’m more skeptical of anything lasting, let alone happiness. Even with the reassuring weight of Clarence pressed against me, I’m still yanked back into that crush of other people. How in 1965 Chumashan linguist Mary Yee passed away, taking the Barbareño language with her. Or the subsequent dispersal of the Dunites, and how what was once an oasis is now a course for ATV drivers. So no disrespect to Ann Patchett, but I’ve been listening to Adam Schlesinger’s music all day while making face masks out of underwear, and at this point no one, not even our president, believes we’ll be out of this thing by Easter. Maintaining perfect happiness seems as preposterous to me as building a utopia, a film set, an oil fortune, on a mountain of sand. “Call it ‘Paradise’ and you can kiss it goodbye,” said Norm Hammond. Before he became a desert historian he was a firefighter, and knows a thing or two about how quickly things can do up in flames. 

But all that being said. The Santa Maria shelter gave us two weeks worth of dog food in a giant plastic sack, and here’s hoping we’ll end up needing much much more.